Sunday, April 2, 2017

51 F. St. Cloud high temperature on Sunday.48 F. average high on April 2.34 F. maximum temperature on April 2, 2016.

April 3, 1999: An ice storm hits Duluth and the Arrowhead. An 800 foot television tower in Duluth collapses due to the weight of the ice.April 3, 1982:
A sharp cold front causes the temperature at Lamberton in Redwood
County to drop from 78 to 7 degrees. This 71 degree change in 24 hours
is the maximum 24-hour temperature change in Minnesota.April 3, 1837: A snowstorm rages for four days at Ft. Snelling and dumps 9 inches.

A Few Light Showers for the Twins Home Opener

You
could have predicted this months ago: partly-soggy weather for the
Twins Home Opener at Target Field with temperatures in the 50s.

Could
be (much) worse: it sleeted on April 23, 1972 at Met Stadium in
Bloomington. The Twins Opener in 1962 brought wind chills in the 20s,
but the first home game in 1980 featured a sweaty high of 90F.
Considering we could be ankle-deep in slush I'll keep my big mouth shut.

It's
dry out there; much of the area running a 1-2 inch rainfall deficit, so
let's not complain about showers on a Monday. The sun peeks out
tomorrow; Wednesday's storm tracks well south of Minnesota. Temperatures
may push 70F next weekend close to home with T-storms Sunday.
There's
still some lingering confusion over semantics: is it 'global warming'
or 'climate change'?

Some federal and state agencies have now banned the
use of the word, climate change. Not to worry.
"Late Late Show"
host James Corden may have the right idea. He refers to climate change
as "endless summer". Tornadoes are now "fun-time twisty winds". And
earthquakes can be referred to as "dirt twerking".

Give it a try.March: 19th Month in a Row of Warmer Than Average at MSP. Here's an excerpt from Dr. Mark Seeley at Minnesota WeatherTalk: "Most
climate observers reported mean monthly temperature values near normal,
or 1 to 2 degrees F warmer than normal for the month. For MSP Airport
it was the 19 consecutive month with above normal temperature. For most
climate stations over half the days of the month were warmer than
normal. Minnesota reported the coldest temperature in the nation on four
dates during the month..."

Severe Threat Shifts East.
The same atmospheric cocktail responsible for a series of violent
tornadoes over Louisiana Sunday will push into southern Alabama today;
tornadic storms possible early tonight into southwest Georgia. Map: NOAA
SPC.

Tornado Bulls-eye.
The greatest chance of supercell thunderstorms capable of tornadoes
will be over southern Alabama, especially Montgomery, Greenville, Troy
and Auburn into Mobile and the far western Panhandle of Florida, near
Pensacola. More violent, long-track tornadoes are expected to spin up
later today.

A Tortured Pattern.
Not much of a break in between weather systems right now. Today's storm
drags a severe squall line across the Deep South with hail, violent
straight-line winds and a few tornadoes. The parent storm pushes
rain across the Ohio Valley, Great Lakes and Mid Atlantic, mixing with
wet snow and sleet across northern New Hampshire. A second storm on its
heels pushes heavy wet snow into Chicago and Grand Rapids by Wednesday
and early Thursday. No rest for the weather-weary with this pattern.
84-hour NAM Future Radar: NOAA and Tropicaltidbits.com.

Tornado Sirens are "Cold War Technology".
Remember that sirens were only meant to be heard outdoors, not inside
homes and businesses. Sirens are part of the warning process, but if you
only rely on sirens you're going to get caught with your Doppler down.
Here's a clip from News-Gazette: "...While
people in the country might not be able to hear the sirens, just about
every emergency official interviewed for this story pointed out without
prompting that tornado sirens are outdoor warning sirens. "You won't
hear them inside your house," Mahomet's Crowley said. "If your windows
are closed, you're not going to hear it unless you're right under it."
The NWS' Miller said sirens aren't necessarily the best way to learn
about a potential tornado. "There's so many ways to get information," he
said. "Don't just say, 'I'm not going to go to the basement until the
siren goes off.'" He encouraged people to use a weather radio and to
monitor social media. Smartphones also now automatically send alerts for
tornado and flash flood warnings. "To be honest, it's Cold War
technology," Miller said about tornado sirens. "It's an important part
of the process, but what people have to understand is, it's not the only
part of the process."Cyclone, Flood Cost "Beyond Comprehension". Cyclone (same thing as a hurricane) "Debbie" did quite a number on Queensland, Australia. Here's an excerpt of an update at news.com.au: "The
full cost of cleaning up cyclone and flood-affected parts of Queensland
won't be known for weeks, but local authorities fear "the sky is the
limit" for the damage bill. One man is confirmed dead, three others are
still missing and Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk described the
devastation across the state as "huge" after meeting with emergency
services in Daisy Hill on Sunday. "It's going to take months to repair,"
Ms Palaszczuk said. About 650 residences throughout northern parts of
the state have been ruled uninhabitable since Cyclone Debbie hit the
coast on Tuesday. Flooding has inundated 38 homes in the southeast and
continues to threaten about 250 properties..."

Stumbling Into Spring.
Weather never moves in a straight line. Oh, how I wish it did. Expect
mostly 50s this week, but both ECMWF (above) and NOAA models show a warm
spike next weekend; a growing chance of 70 degrees by next Sunday,
depending on convection (T-storms would keep things a few degrees
cooler). Twin Cities meteograph: WeatherBell.

Mid-April: Cool & Stormy East, Mild West.
The 2 week GFS forecast at 500 mb (18,000 feet) shows a lingering
trough of low pressure over the eastern USA, with ridging from the
Rockies to the Plains, where temperatures may run above average.

Towns Where April Is Snowiest Month of the Year.
Who knew? From the Black Hills of South Dakota into parts of Colorado
and Wyoming, according to research compiled by prolific climate guru
Brian Brettschneider.

Vast, Untapped Potential for Solar Rooftops in the U.S., Says Google. Here's an excerpt of a post at Greentech Media that made me do a double-take: "...Now
that Project Sunroof's availability is countrywide, Google’s amassed
data has started to reveal some interesting trends and information. For
one thing, Google says that 79 percent of the rooftops it’s analyzed are
viable for solar, which is good news for rooftop solar providers. That
doesn’t mean that 79 percent of rooftops should or will adopt solar,
though. Rather, it means that 79 percent technically get enough sun to
be able to accommodate solar panels. That finding is likely a generous interpretation of the data..."

A "Solar Saudi Arabia".
No coal, gas or oil? Not to worry in Chile, which is blasted by free
solar energy yearround. There may be no country on Earth in a better
position to take full advantage of clean, renewable power, argues The Washington Post: "...It
is also the world’s best place to produce solar energy, with the most
potent sun power on the planet. So powerful, in fact, that something
extraordinary happened last year when the Chilean government invited
utility companies to bid on public contracts. Solar producers dominated
the auction, offering to supply electricity at about half the cost of
coal-fired plants. It wasn’t because of a government subsidy for
alternative energy. In Chile and a growing list of nations, the price of
solar energy has fallen so much that it is increasingly beating out
conventional sources of power. Industry experts and government
regulators hail this moment as a turning point in the history of human
electricity-making. “This is the beginning of a trend that will only
accelerate,” said Chilean Energy Minister Andrés Rebolledo. “We’re
talking about an infinite fuel source...”Wind Power Cuts CO2. Here's an excerpt from Climate Central: "We’ve
reached the end of the windiest month of the year. But in other months,
wind will continue to play an increasingly large role in the U.S. power
mix. At the end of last year, wind capacity surpassed hydroelectric capacity for the first time in the U.S. Over the past decade, wind power has exploded in the U.S. Over that time, generating capacity from wind has increased by a factor of seven, surpassing 82,000 megawatts, or enough to power 24 million homes.
Wind is most consistent in the Great Plains and on the Front Range of
the Rockies. The prevailing west winds come rushing off of the
mountains, making the area especially conducive for generating
electricity, as higher wind speeds produce disproportionately more power
from a wind turbine..."

Hackers Next Target Could Be the U.S. Electric Grid. Here's an excerpt from CNBC: "You've
heard about hackers trying to steal credit card numbers and wipe out
bank accounts. But there's another group that many cybersecurity experts
say especially worry them. These criminals are targeting critical infrastructure, like power grids
— and what makes them dangerous is that some are backed by governments
and big money. "Turning off water, turning off electricity. Those are
all realistic attacks now," said Liam O' Murchu a director with
cybersecurity company Symantec, the manufacturer of Norton security
products. Symantec is currently tracking more than 100 government backed
groups, more than ten times the number from five years ago..." (Map credit: FEMA).UW Professor: The Information War is Real, and We're Losing It. Because conspiracy theories are so much more interesting than reality. Here's an excerpt of a harrowing story at The Seattle Times: "...Starbird
is in the UW’s Department of Human Centered Design & Engineering —
the study of the ways people and technology interact. Her team analyzed
58 million tweets sent after mass shootings during a 10-month period.
They searched for terms such as “false flag” and “crisis actor,” web
slang meaning a shooting is not what the government or the traditional
media is reporting it to be. It happens after every mass shooting or
attack. If you search for “false flag” and “Westminster,” you’ll find
thousands of results theorizing that last week’s attack outside British
Parliament was staged (presumably to bring down Brexit, which makes no
sense, but making sense is not a prerequisite). Starbird’s insight was
to map the digital connections between all this buzzing on Twitter with a
conglomeration of websites. Then she analyzed the content of each site
to try to answer the question: Just what is this alternative media
ecosystem saying?..."

ESPN Has Seen the Future of TV and They're Not Really Into It. Is ESPN reinventing and innovating fast enough? Here's food for thought from Bloomberg Businessweek: "...In
some respects, the challenges facing ESPN are the same that confront
every other media company: Young people simply aren’t consuming cable
TV, newspapers, or magazines in the numbers they once did, and digital
outlets still aren’t lucrative enough to make up the deficit. But while
most of ESPN’s TV peers have courted cord cutters—CBS and Turner
Broadcasting, for instance, are allowing anyone to watch some of their
March Madness games online for free—ESPN’s view cuts against the
conventional wisdom in new media. “Everything we do supports the pay
television business,” says John Kosner, the network’s head of digital
and print media. The strategy, simply put: Defend the cable-TV bundle at
all costs..."

Elon Musk's Billion-Dollar Crusade to Stop the A.I. Apocalypse. It's cheap hype until it happens, then it's "why weren't we prepared?" Here's an excerpt from Vanity Fair: "...You’d
think that anytime Musk, Stephen Hawking, and Bill Gates are all
raising the same warning about A.I.—as all of them are—it would be a
10-alarm fire. But, for a long time, the fog of fatalism over the Bay
Area was thick. Musk’s crusade was viewed as Sisyphean at best and
Luddite at worst. The paradox is this: Many tech oligarchs see
everything they are doing to help us, and all their benevolent
manifestos, as streetlamps on the road to a future where, as Steve
Wozniak says, humans are the family pets. But Musk is not going gently.
He plans on fighting this with every fiber of his carbon-based being.
Musk and Altman have founded OpenAI, a billion-dollar nonprofit company,
to work for safer artificial intelligence..."

Even Fox News Slams EPA Chief's Climate Denial: "All Kinds of Studies Contradict You". Kudos to Chris Wallace for drilling down and challenging the new EPA Administrator, as reported at ThinkProgress: "Even
Fox News can’t believe that the head of the Environmental Protection
Agency, Scott Pruitt, doesn’t accept the basic scientific finding that
carbon dioxide is a primary contributor to recent global warming. To
promote President Trump’s disastrous plan to gut EPA and U.S. climate
action, Pruitt has been pushing his dangerous beliefs on all the major
networks. Pruitt may have thought the Murdoch-owned network that has led
the way on attacking climate science for two decades would be a
friendly audience. He was wrong. Fox News Sunday
anchor Chris Wallace thoroughly debunked Pruitt for defending his
absurd claim that CO2 is not “a primary contributor to the global
warming that we see...”

MIT Climate Scientist Responds on Disaster Costs and Climate Change. Here's an excerpt from FiveThirtyEight: "...Looking
ahead, I collaborated with Yale economist Robert Mendelsohn and his
colleagues in estimating global hurricane damage changes through the
year 2100, based on hurricanes “downscaled” from four climate models. We
estimate that global hurricane damage will about double owing to
demographic trends, and double again because of climate change. These
projections are not inconsistent with what we’ve been seeing in
hurricane data and in economic damage from hurricanes. Besides this
study, there are robust theory and modeling results that show increased
risk of hydrological extremes (floods and droughts) and heat-related
problems. Some of these predicted trends are beginning to emerge in
actuarial data. Governments, markets and ordinary people are beginning
to account for the increased risk. Those who wait for actuarial trends
to emerge at the 95 percent confidence level before acting do so at
their peril." (Hurricane Joaquin file image: NASA).

Climate Change Pushing Floods, Cyclones to New Extremes. As
ocean waters continue to warm what will be the impact on cyclone
(hurricane) intensity going forward? With Australia's Cyclone Debbie in
mind, here's an excerpt of a post at Climate Code Red: "...The
frequency of major flood events (defined as events which caused
extensive flooding within 50 kilometres of the coast, or inundation that
extended 20 kilometres along the coast) along Australia's eastern
seaboard has doubled in last 150 years, with climate change one of the
possible factors, senior Bureau of Meteorology researchers say. Record-breaking
heavy rainfall and a clear upward trend in downpours over the last 30
years fits in with global temperature rise caused by greenhouse gases. Statistical analysis
of rainfall data from 1901 to 2010 around the globe, shows that from
1980 to 2010 there were 12% more of these intense events than would be
expected in a climate without global warming. Wet regions generally saw a
bigger increase in deluges and drier regions a smaller one. In
southeast Asia, the observed increase in record-breaking rainfall events
is as high as 56%..."

General Electric Chief: "Cliate Change is Real". Here's an excerpt from an article at MarketWatch: "General
Electric Co. CEO Jeffrey Immelt defended efforts to reduce emissions
and fight climate change, after President Donald Trump reversed rules
that pushed U.S. utilities to use cleaner-burning fuels. In a blog post
to employees Wednesday, Immelt highlighted the administration’s move and
said climate change “should be addressed on a global basis through
multi-national agreements” such as the 2015 Paris Agreement. The U.S.
hasn’t withdrawn from that agreement, but the executive order has raised
concern it will be hard to reach the pact’s targets. “We believe
climate change is real and the science is well accepted,” Immelt wrote.
“We hope that the United States continues to play a constructive role in
furthering solutions to these challenges...”